Steve Granitz
LONDON — Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness company Goop has been warned that its U.K. operations could be shut down after failing to file its accounts.
According to Goop’s page on Companies House, a registrar for companies in the U.K., the firm’s accounts are overdue.
Companies House issued a second notice for a “compulsory strike-off” in April, which warns a company that it could be taken off the U.K. register and dissolved from two months after the notice.
But Goop’s strike-off process was suspended last week, according to Companies House, giving the company more time to file its accounts. Goop first received a strike-off notice in 2019 but this was also suspended, with the accounts listed as having been audited in July 2020.
A spokesperson for Goop wasn’t immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
Paltrow launched Goop in 2008 but registered it as a U.K. company in 2011, when she lived in England with her ex-husband Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay. Its most recent public valuation was for $250 million in 2018, according to The New York Times.
Goop is also facing a lawsuit in the U.S. from a man in Texas who claimed the brand’s vagina-scented candle “exploded” after burning it for a few hours.
NBC News reported earlier this week that Colby Watson filed a class-action complaint Monday. Watson reportedly said he bought a $75 “This Smells Like My Vagina” candle from the Goop website in January, but after lighting it for the first time a month later and letting it burn for three hours, it allegedly “exploded” and became “engulfed in high flames.”
The candle has a warning that advises users not to burn it for more than two hours, according to its listing on the Goop website.
A Goop spokesperson told NBC News that Watson’s claim was “frivolous.”
This isn’t the first lawsuit Goop has faced, having settled a $145,000 case in 2018 over the health claims it made about using vaginal jade eggs.
The Hollywood star’s brand has faced other criticisms about its health and wellness claims.
Last year, the CEO of Britain’s National Health Service, Simon Stevens, reportedly said that Paltrow’s Netflix show “the Goop Lab” pushed “dubious wellness products and dodgy procedures.”
He argued that Paltrow’s brand “peddles psychic vampire repellent, says chemical sunscreen is a bad idea, and promotes colonic irrigation and DIY coffee enema machines, despite them carrying considerable risks to health.”
A spokeswoman for Goop told the BBC at the time that it was “transparent when we cover emerging topics that may be unsupported by science or may be in early stages of review.”
